If he knew how to do battle in the midst of men in order to win them to the faith, he loved, as Celano says, to fly away like a bird going to make its nest upon the mountain.[5] With men truly pious the prayer of the lips, the formulated prayer, is hardly other than an inferior form of true prayer.

Even when it is sincere and attentive, and not a mechanical repetition, it is only a prelude for souls not dead of religious materialism.
Nothing resembles piety so much as love.

Formularies of prayer are as incapable of speaking the emotions of the soul as model love-letters of speaking the transports of an impassioned heart.

To true piety as well as to profound love, the formula is a sort of profanation.
To pray is to talk with God, to lift ourselves up to him, to converse with him that he may come down to us.

It is an act of meditation, of reflection, which presupposes the effort of all that is most personal in us.
Looked at in this sense, prayer is the mother of all liberty and all freedom.
Whether or no it be a soliloquy of the soul with itself, the soliloquy would be none the less the very foundation of a strong individuality.
With St.Francis as with Jesus, prayer has this character of effort which makes of it the greatest moral act.